An online platform supporting the analysis of water adaptation measures in the Alps

Climate change may result in reduced water supply from the Alps - an important water resource for Europe. This paper presents a multilingual platform that combines spatial and multi-criteria decision-support tools to facilitate stakeholder collaboration in the analysis of water management adaptation options. The platform has an interactive map interface that allows participants to select a location of their interest within the Alpine Arc. By utilising the decision-support tool, stakeholders can identify suitable adaptation solutions for different geographical units, according to their experience and preference. The platform was used to involve experts across Alpine borders, domains and decision-making levels, as well as a group of university students. The experts favoured the planning instruments for saving water, while the students inclined towards the measures that would improve water conservation. The initial results confirmed the suitability of the platform for future involvement of decision-makers in spatio-temporal analyses of adaptation pathways in the Alps

Influence of climate, soil, and land cover on plant species distribution in the European Alps

International audienceAlthough the importance of edaphic factors and habitat structure for plant growth and survival is known, both are often neglected in favor of climatic drivers when investigating the spatial patterns of plant species and diversity. Yet, especially in mountain ecosystems with complex topography, missing edaphic and habitat components may be detrimental for a sound understanding of biodiversity distribution. Here, we compare the relative importance of climate, soil and land cover variables when predicting the distributions of 2,616 vascular plant species in the European Alps, representing approximately two‐thirds of all European flora. Using presence‐only data, we built point‐process models (PPMs) to relate species observations to different combinations of covariates. We evaluated the PPMs through block cross‐validations and assessed the independent contributions of climate, soil, and land cover covariates to predict plant species distributions using an innovative predictive partitioning approach. We found climate to be the most influential driver of spatial patterns in plant species with a relative influence of ~58.5% across all species, with decreasing importance from low to high elevations. Soil (~20.1%) and land cover (~21.4%), overall, were less influential than climate, but increased in importance along the elevation gradient. Furthermore, land cover showed strong local effects in lowlands, while the contribution of soil stabilized at mid‐elevations. The decreasing influence of climate with elevation is explained by increasing endemism, and the fact that climate becomes more homogeneous as habitat diversity declines at higher altitudes. In contrast, soil predictors were found to follow the opposite trend. Additionally, at low elevations, human‐mediated land cover effects appear to reduce the importance of climate predictors. We conclude that soil and land cover are, like climate, principal drivers of plant species distribution in the European Alps. While disentangling their effects remains a challenge, future studies can benefit markedly by including soil and land cover effects when predicting species distributions

Torsional Vibrations of Fluid-Filled Multilayered Transversely Isotropic Finite Circular Cylinder

article n° 1650032International audienceAn analytical and numerical study for the torsional vibrations of viscous fluid-filled three-layer transversely isotropic cylinder is presented in this paper. The equations of motion of solid and fluid are respectively formulated using the constitutive equations of a transversely isotropic cylinder and the constitutive equations of a viscous fluid. The analytical solution of the frequency equation is obtained using the boundary conditions at the free surface of the solid layer and the boundary conditions at the fluid–solid interface. The frequency equation is deduced and analytically solved using the symbolic Software Mathematica. The finite element method using Comsol Multiphysics Software results are compared with present method for validation and an acceptable match between them were obtained. It is shown that the results from the proposed method are in good agreement with numerical solutions. The influence of fluid dynamic viscosity is thoroughly analyzed and the effect of the isotropic properties on the natural frequencies is also investigated